Casinos, cardrooms and other gaming establishments employ many card dealers. The dealers shuffle cards, deal the cards, take bets, and otherwise play the card game. Substantial amounts of the dealers' time is spent in just shuffling the decks of cards in preparation for the ensuing card hands. During the time the dealer is shuffling, the game table is inactive and bets are not being placed. From the standpoint of the casino, it is desirable to minimize the time spent in preparing the card decks for additional play.
A number of prior art card deck shuffling machines have been invented. Most of the prior automatic shufflers have suffered from various problems. Many are relatively slow and do not help the basic problem encountered by the gaming establishment. Others are relatively complex and thus expensive to build and maintain.
Another problem area suffered by both manual and automated shuffling techniques is associated with having sequences of cards for which shuffling has not changed the sequential order. This can provide information usable to an astute gambler. Poor shuffling can also create concentrations or "slugs" which are of significance with respect to cards having a value of 10, such as in playing blackjack. A skilled card counting gambler can take advantage of such card slugs to turn the odds against the casino and in favor of the card counter. Such slugs also indicate the failure of prior art shufflers to in fact effectively rearrange the order of cards in a deck or decks being shuffled.
Thus there remains a strong need for improved shuffling machines which can effectively reorder a deck or series of decks. Additionally, there remains a need for an improved automatic card shuffler which is relatively easy to build, operate and maintain.